The browser wars are in full swing. Ars breaks down the numbers and discovers …

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Safari is either making huge gains or holding steady in the browser wars; it all depends on whose stats you use. The same can be said of Firefox, while Internet Explorer is losing ground in the US but holding steady worldwide.

The conflicting numbers come courtesy of two web metrics tracking firms, Net Applications and OneStat. Net Applications' figures come from its live stats customers and sample over 40,000 URLs. OneStat uses a daily sample of 2 million visitors spread across 100 countries to come up with its numbers.

Net Applications' numbers cover the US only and paint rosy pictures for both Firefox and Safari. Firefox has seen its market share bounce from 9.5 percent in January 2006 to 13.67 percent a year later, although the latter figure is down a bit from December 2006's 14.0 percent.

Safari has seen even stronger growth, according to Net Applications. In January 2006, 3.0 percent of all web surfers were using Safari. A year later, that figure had grown by over 56 percent, to 4.70 percent.

Over the same time period, Net Applications reports that usage of Internet Explorer in all of its flavorsIE 5, 6, and 7has dropped steadily. Starting at a high of 85.31 percent at the beginning of 2006, IE usage dipped to 83.56 percent in July and bottomed out in December at 79.64 percent, recovering modestly to 79.75 percent for January 2007.

OneStat's figures tell a different story, both in the US and around the world. For the US, OneStat reports a much more modest decline for Internet Explorer, which dipped to 78.13 percent last month from 80.91 percent a year ago. Firefox saw a significant gain of 14.3 percent in the US, while Safari saw a much more modest rise of 3.7 percent, from 3.55 percent in January 2006 to 3.68 last month.

Data source: OneStat

In contrast, the worldwide browser market share figures are much more static. Internet Explorer usage has remained almost static over the past year, dropping a mere 0.01 percentage point over the last year. Firefox has shown modest growth during the past year. The open-source browser was the choice of 11.69 percent of web surfers in January 2007 compared to 11.23 percent the year previous.

Data source: OneStat

The biggest surprise in OneStat's worldwide market share figures comes courtesy of Safari. Apple's web browser, the choice of 2.02 percent of web surfers tracked by the firm in May 2006, dropped to 1.64 percent at the beginning of 2007. Overall, that's a 12.7 percent decline from January 2006's 1.88 percent figure.

There's a big difference, especially for Safari. While Apple's home-rolled web browser is doing very well in the US, it's slipping around the world. That can be explained in part by the rapid growth of the PC market in countries where Apple isn't a big player, most significantly, India and China. What about the wide variance between OneStat's and Net Applications' US numbers? Here, we can turn to the most recent overall PC sales figures, from the fourth quarter of 2006, to help make sense of the numbers.

Although it is unable to crack the top five in worldwide PC sales, Apple has seen strong growth in the US over the past year. The company went from 3.7 percent of the market during the fourth quarter of 2005 to 5.1 percent for the same period in 2006, for growth of 30.6 percent. That was the strongest growth for any PC manufacturer in the US as the overall US market shrunk by 3.2 percent.

Firefox continues to grow, no matter what the venue. In the US, Firefox is definitely making gains at the expense of Internet Explorer. Worldwide, some of those more modest gains appear to have come at the expense of Opera and Netscape. Firefox jumped 0.46 percentage points between January 2006 and 2007, while Opera dropped from 0.77 percent to 0.58 and Netscape dropped 0.03 percentage points to 0.13 percent. Meanwhile, IE's 0.01 percentage point share dip was statistically insignificant.

Curiously, the release of Internet Explorer 7 last summer didn't provide any additional momentum for Microsoft. IE7's browser share soared from 3.18 percent in October 2006 to 25.01 percent last month, but all of that gain came at the expense of older versions of the browser, especially IE6, which dipped from 77.17 percent to 54.04 percent, according to Net Applications.

If there is any clear takeaway from the morass of statistics we just waded through, it is that competition between web browsers is alive and well. In the US and some Western European countries, users are increasingly willing to ditch Internet Explorer. In the US, some of those old IE users are apparently showing up on a different platform as well as a different browser.